- Bezos Expeditions backed CuspAI in a $450 million Series B round, pushing the Cambridge-based startup to a $2.6 billion valuation.
- NVIDIA and Meta joined CuspAI’s AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of 45+ partners aimed at speeding up chip material discovery.
- The shortage behind the deal centers on raw materials like gallium, where China controls 99% of refined supply, with the IEA projecting demand could outstrip supply by 2030.
Jeff Bezos ties with Nvidia strengthened significantly this week as his investment arm, Bezos Expeditions, backed CuspAI, a Cambridge-based startup that just hit a $2.6 billion valuation. Nvidia and Meta also signed on as partners to address a materials shortage that has been slowing chip production.
CuspAI closed a $450 million Series B round on July 20, led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, AMD Ventures, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund. The round marks a roughly fivefold jump from the startup’s September valuation of about $520 million.
The startup, founded in Cambridge in 2024, uses a platform called MIRA to test candidate materials that would normally take a lab years to work through manually. CuspAI also launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of over 45 partners that includes Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, and Hyundai Motor Group.
This partnership aims to pool computing power and lab data so teams can test and verify new materials faster than any single company could manage alone. Chad Edwards, CuspAI’s co-founder and CEO, said chipmakers are “frantically searching for new materials.”
The shortage driving this deal stems from raw materials, not memory chips or electricity. The International Energy Agency projects that data center demand for gallium could run about 10% ahead of supply by 2030, and China currently controls roughly 99% of refined gallium worldwide.
Other elements chipmakers rely on, including iridium, ruthenium, and tantalum, are also getting harder and pricier to source. Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said “CuspAI built a search engine that changes that.”
CuspAI remains a private company with no indication of an IPO on the horizon, so retail investors cannot buy into the startup directly. Investors can track public companies connected to this story, as Nvidia and Meta both stand to gain if CuspAI delivers usable materials at scale.
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